Taskmaster + reading roundup (catching up on series edition)
Taskmaster s17e2 -- No particular seismic shifts in this episode, but of course I'm still enjoying the experience. spoilers!
Intros -- I loved the way Steve and Sophie picked up on Alex's use of "poppet" after Greg said he didn't like it. Too bad they didn't continue it.
Prize task -- man, Steve is going for the gold on these prize tasks. I was able to appreciate this one more than "Peg Mavis" last week. It's an impressive mix of highbrow and lowbrow to go from "BOOBIES" to haiku that can be spelled out in upsidedown calculator words, but also a very lowbrow haiku. Just, hats off. It absolutely deserved 5 points, and I notice it's the second week in a row where Greg's comment is basically that he can't help but give him the top score given the level of effort, so clearly Steve's strategy is paying off. (And he did share on the podcast that it's very much a strategy to focus on the prize tasks and collect the low-hanging fruit.) I don't understand how Joanne's bat disco party got 5 points too, but maybe Greg was trying to make up for giving her too low points on the previous episode's prize task. I mean, her actual prize that she brought in was a plastic bat that didn't even look like a disco pose... I was also underwhelmed by John's Chicago Bulls logo; I actually do find that very funny, but I've seen that on Insta before, and I bet he did too, rather than coming up with it himself. If Nick's story is true, that's cute, but I'm skeptical and so wasn't that impressed by his vase/drum either. And Sophie's pie thing led to a funny bit, thanks to Steve jumping in to back her up, even bringing it back to "BOOBIES", since that had appealed to Greg, but there was no salvaging Sophie's prize, I guess.
The Claw task -- Alex was very nice to remind Steve about the no-opening-the-door rule (Steve explained on the podcast this was his first task), but the rest of Steve's performance is just impressive. You've got to hand it to the man, he's just really good. John also had a good showing (I bet all that cramming helped), but I'm a bit sad for him that even him finding the shortcut didn't net him the highest score, because Steve was just too fast. And after Greg messed with him by saying he had to disqualify John (poor man really did look like he was sweating XD) Joanne and Sophie's attempts were just fun to watch, and I liked Nick's attempt with magnets, even though it didn't actually seem to work that well. Ooh, and Joanne's idea of extracting the cat through a different, easier hole and then lowering and then immediately raising it on a rope through the right hole. I don't have a ton to say about this one specifically, but it was sort of your classic Taskmaster task, and it was nice to see the range of approaches and competencies. I think also, other than the tiebreaker last episode, it was the first actual problem-solving task of the series, and it's always nice to see how the contestants' minds work.
Team task -- OK, I actually agree with Steve that the team of 3's special effects movie was more epic but Steve and Nick's was "more better", because theirs was very elegantly done. Except for the horrible pancake batter, and Steve explained on the podcast that Nick had had to do stuff with sticks, so his hands would not be obscuring the plates, pan handle, etc. Steve also shared on the podcast that he had to bail early for a play he was acting in, so all the greenscreen stuff except for the very end was Nick on his own after Steve already left -- and that does explain why the roles were so unevently distributed. The team of 3's task looked like fun chaos, and I enjoyed John and Joanne trying to explain how the objects floating around Sophie were symbolic of the sun (pepper) and toxic masculinity (armless mannekin torso), but I thought they were a bit overscored.
Sticking and hanging task -- wait, how did Sophie's star stay on? did she just hook the star over the board and that was counted as legit? I mean, I'm not complaining about Sophie getting 5 points for once, I'm happy for her! but is that actually within the rules? So sad that John flew too close to the sun in this case and the board was just too heavy, because his Blu Tack technique was solid, actually. AMAZING how closely Steve's David ended up cutting it, but that was properly exciting (and I guess that toffee might've saved the day). Joanne once again demonstrates that her strategy of not being overly ambitious but just getting the task done is a very solid strategy for Taskmaster. I mean, really, she could've stuck a piece of paper to the board and walked away with the same 3 points. I am, however, a bit concerned that she associates "science" with Elon Musk... Like some of the Reddit commenters, I assumed that Nick's choice of bottle was because you can modulate its weight by pouring out the water, until it was a weight that he could stick for long enough -- but either that's not what he intended at all, or he forgot in the middle of his breakdown. Poor Nick XD At least John's failure was dramatic; his was just very sad. Nick seems to have the amazing quality of making everyone, including Greg, feel sorry for him when things go badly (which is a lot), but not, sadly for him, in a way that would get him some points, as he hopefully inquires. Steve and Ed on the podcast discuss the idea both of them had -- Steve AFTER the task -- of putting the board on the floor and sticking something heavy to it (maybe standing on it) and letting gravity do all the work -- and now I'm sad that nobody actually did that, because that would be brilliant, along the lines of winning the s7 blinking task by just closing youe eyes, which nobody did either.
Live task (guessing movies from first/last letters) -- the gessing from first letters part was less interesting than most studio tasks, I thought, and even Joanne's random wrong guesses like "Batman Bigman" or the episode namer were just not that funny (not a lot of fun phrases in this episode in general, I guess, unlike last week's, so Steve's puns about John's robot getting "humans" and exhorting Patatas to "be bravas" had to do the heavy lifting). And it's one of those things that's definitely easier for team of 3 than team of 2 because they have one more person -- or, if you want, double the number of people -- guessing. (Although Reddit points out that they have to navigate more different accents, which does seem like it's sometimes a challenge for them in this task, so, maybe it balances out?) The last round of guessing from the ends of movies was more interesting, and I wish more of the task had been that.
I wonder how John feels about being tied with Sophie this episode XD
Also, re: this outtake -- you don't have to read the fanfiction, Greg XD Most people don't go searching AO3 for fic about themselves. Also, I'm counting down to when something title "Lovely Home Together" shows up in the Taskmaster RPS tag. That seems to be how this cycle goes...
I was feeling fuzzy headed and needed something low-impact to do with my brain, so I ended up listening to John reading his autobiography, A Robins Among the Pigeons, on his radio talk show, and now he is even more my favorite this series. The bit that won me over completely was spoilers I guess the chapter on his time in Oxford, where he started smoking a pipe because that's what you do, isn't it, and kept going to The Bird and the Baby as a ritual outing, and writing a poem based on the Tolkien mythos entitled "Seven Stars and Seven Stones" for a poetry class when the assignment was to write an ottava rima about mythology, and then being too embarrassed to read it out loud to the class and claiming the emotion behind the piece was still too raw. I've never related to a Taskmaster contestant harder, lol XD
*
It's T-24 hours for Lyorn, so I'm trying to clear the decks before that drops:
11. Martha Wells, System Collapse -- this picks up, chronologically, right after Network Effect, which is my favorite of the Murderbot series, and so I had huge hopes for it... but actually it ended up being challenging to get through. The first third was a slog, frankly, similar to how I felt about Rogue Protocol (my least favorite of the Murderbots, although I need some distance from this one to figure out whether maybe this one is going to take over that mantle...); the middle third picked up a bit relative to that slow start, but I found it weirdly fanficcy, and then it's only the final third, which really picks up the pace, that felt more like a return to form, and I did enjoy that part, but on average this ends up being "meh". Which is too bad, because I still absolutely love ART and ART and Murderbot's relationship, and I want to enjoy the books that come next, but now I'm a bit more apprehensive about whether I will or not. Spoilers from here
So, the first third, I have two problem with it, I think. The first I think has to do with "redacted" -- i.e. Murderbot avoiding talking about the thing that turns out to be a traumatic flashback/PTSD, and also just generally being in a bad frame of mind. Now, first person narrator talking around PTSD / first person narrator explicitly not telling the reader a thing is something I normally love -- I've loved it with Vlad Taltos and with Peter Grant, for example -- but something about how it's done with Murderbot just didn't work for me. I think maybe because Murderbot's normal narration is already more of a downer, and Murderbot in a particularly low frame of mind is just not fun for me anymore. The other problem I had with the first third is, there's just too much going on simultaneously. I saw several people on my flist who started System Collapse and then thought they had to reread Network Effect to follow what was going on, but I don't think that's a) the real problem that makes SystemCollapse hard to follow, but also b) not something a sequel should require. I think the problem is, Murderbot is following multiple parallel threads early on -- there's what's happening with it and the humans accompanying it, there's what's happening aboard ART (not necessarily all in the same location), what it's seeing through Three with a different group of people, feed with Mensah, private feed with ART -- like five separate things, and while Murderbot is built for multiple parallel inputs and misses them when it has too few drones, we the human readers are not. And this sort of multiple perception can be a neat stunt-writing thing -- I recall liking very much getting Justice of Torren's multiple-ancillary POV in one of the Ann Leckie books, e.g. -- but at this length I didn't find it neat, just confusing. I think part of why the second third picked up for me a bit was that Murderbot was in the blackout zone and was thus limited to just the humans it was with and ART-drone, and eventually also AdaCol2 -- a much more manageable number of inputs.
But that middle third is also kind of slow, and I never actually cared about the fate of the colonists because we never really got to meet them properly (and also mostly I don't care about the humans very much in these books). And Murderbot was still down on itself, although I did appreciate the interaction between it and ART-drone, it and AdaCol2 the local system in the primitive language they have to use to communicate, and also Tarik the ex-corporate commando (although I completely do not care about his sex thing with Rathi, like, at all). The climactic moment of this part is Murderbot et al putting together the propaganda vid -- I mean, it's a documentary, but it's still a propaganda vid, just, you know, a GOOD propaganda vid. And this felt really fanficcy to me. Like, it's nice that Murderbot gets to make a media thing, and it feels right that it uses its experience to help humans make an informed decision -- it echoes thematically with giving SecUnits the keys to their governor modules and letting them decide whether to turn them and what to do next -- empowering people to make choices for themselves... but it felt fitting in the way of good fanfiction, rather than what I want from Murderbot proper.
But then actual action started happening, and Murderbot was no longer moping about [redacted], and things really picked up for me in the last thrid. Finally the pacing was actually exciting, and I kept wanting to read ahead instead of having to force myself to read because the book would disappear off my Kindle soon and I'd waited a long time to get it. I enjoyed B-E's Lenore having to join up with Murderbot's bunch after an attempted coup against her. Murderbot asking AdaCol2 for help with increasing desperation was great, and I was happy to learn that it had gone down but survived and could start helping Murderbot again. The final escape, where Murderbot takes control over ART-drone's pathfinders because ART-drone is too damaged and "boops" the hostile shuttle with one of them as a defensive maneuver was great! And I like that Murderbot is contining to offer SecUnits it meets freedom, and now we have one B-E one who decided to keep the fact that it's hacked its governor module a secret and pretend to keep doing its job, like Murderbot had done for a while.
And the ending was great, with the bigger, more powerful ship (Holism) that ART hates, and tells Murderbot not to talk to (but Murderbot offers Three to listen to it, so that Holism might also get an emotional support SecUnit of its own). The passive-aggressive one-upmanshipvia sigfigs was beautiful.
ART continues to be my favorite thing about this series by far. I was delighted to hear that ART is considered to be in command of itself even under normal circumstances and is second-in-command of missions after Seth, and has the same position in the teaching faculty and in the underground railroad thing they've got going as Iris, I guess kind of as an older sib to her I guess. ART doing his TV show villain thing ("We have your group locked down and are negotiating [their] surrender." "I'm not with them. [...] You'll have to begotiate your surrender to me separately." And "I wouldn't recommend it. I lack a sense of proportional response. I don't advise engaging with me on any level" -- and then playing chicken with the B-E shuttle XD) And of course the interaction with Murderbot ('"I've fucked everything up," I'd told ART. [...] ART had said, That's nothing new. I ignored that because it was just trying to reassure me. If it started being sympathetic it would be terrifying. [...] "Something in me broke." My wormhole drive is broken. "That can be fixed," I said. [...] "This is happening in my organic never tissue." Yes, which is why the humans diagnosed it so quickly, ART said. When it happens to them, are they considered disposable? [...] "Stop, stop it. This isn't you talking this is just your..." Yeah, I'd walked into that one, too. My certification in advanced trauma protocol? it said. Of course, that can't possibly be useful in this situation. ') and then, when ART-drone is badly damaged, Murderbot cueing up its favorite episode of WorldHoppers for comfort -- and then ART-prime bossing Murderbot and Iris around ("Don't just sit there, ART said to me and Iris [...] Console each other. I said, You fuck off at the same time as Iris said, Oh, shut it, Peri, and that felt even better.") ART and Tarik arguing was also fun (Tarik said, Oh please, don't start with it. [...] Tarik is confused by philosophical debate, ART-drone said. Because it likes to win and it won't shut up until it does, Tarik said. Tarik has an issue with projecting his emotions onto others, ART-drone said.")
Hopefully the fact that the ending worked for me much better than the beginning is a good sign for Murderbot's subsequent adventres with Murderbot, even though they will presumably include the rest of Perihelion's crew and possibly multiple inputs. And I do look forward to more Murderbot and Tarik interaction.
Random things: I learned from a panel some time ago that the various media things Murderbot watches are sort of patterned on real shows. So, ART's beloved WorldHoppers is SGA, and I think Sanctuary Moon is How To Get Away with Murder? When Murderbot mentions "a show that [...] was semi-historical, about early humans leaving their original system for the first time", I wondered if this was something like The Expanse. And I assume Medcenter Argala is General Hospital (since it's meant to be a particularly long-running show).
Quotes about things other than ART (just one quote, really XD):
"Tarik did a body language thing that started as an aborted clap on my shoulder and ended with an awkward shrug as he remembered I wouldn't like it."
12. Here Be Dragons (RoL GN), Ben Aaronovitch and Andrew Cartmel -- I was disappointed by the last GN and so held off on getting this one, especially as Amazon's prices on the printe editions went up by like 50% with this one, but meathiel said this one was good, so I went ahead and ordered it. And I did like it a lot more than the average GN in this series. spoilers from here Favorite bits were the page where Peter checks off the various legendary critters he's faced, complete with going up against a dragon in Conan the Barbarian loincloth and armed with a sword and projecting forward to facing down a, what is that, a Beholder? in full pointy hat wizard get up, Mick describing his friend Plugs as looking "like Gandalf joined the Hell's Angels" (accurate!), and "Scully" (not his real name, and he's actually the believer, not the skeptic) believing in all the stuff about UFO sightings but being dismissive of Peter's actual brand of weird bollocks, and also the contact photo Peter has chosen for him. I liked the NPA (chopper coppers, heh) team in general, especially the ex-military pilot who's heard all the jokes about her avian last name, and their Top Gun quotes swear jar. I was also amused by Peter getting to meet Patsy the fellow architecture nerd and then getting infected by her questioning inflections at the end of sentences? even in the narration boxes? I enjoyed the Frank Caffery cameo, suggesting to call Peter's plan for corraling the wyverns "Operation Godzilla" or "Operation Khaleesi." I enjoyed the plot of this too. The fey don't always work well for me in this series, but I found their part in this entertaining here. I probably couldn't appreciate the music cameos as much as some people, but I liked the way music was woven through the whole story, inciting incident, trigger for the attacks, as Peter eventually figured out, and also resolution, being the hinge of Peter's plan. And I liked that Plugs got over his belle dame sans merci after all, and the wyverns got to live happily in Wales. Also neat to see how the twins are coming along and Abigail's current hair evolution, and learn that Peter has apparently read Anne McCaffrey. So yeah, I liked this one!
Intros -- I loved the way Steve and Sophie picked up on Alex's use of "poppet" after Greg said he didn't like it. Too bad they didn't continue it.
Prize task -- man, Steve is going for the gold on these prize tasks. I was able to appreciate this one more than "Peg Mavis" last week. It's an impressive mix of highbrow and lowbrow to go from "BOOBIES" to haiku that can be spelled out in upsidedown calculator words, but also a very lowbrow haiku. Just, hats off. It absolutely deserved 5 points, and I notice it's the second week in a row where Greg's comment is basically that he can't help but give him the top score given the level of effort, so clearly Steve's strategy is paying off. (And he did share on the podcast that it's very much a strategy to focus on the prize tasks and collect the low-hanging fruit.) I don't understand how Joanne's bat disco party got 5 points too, but maybe Greg was trying to make up for giving her too low points on the previous episode's prize task. I mean, her actual prize that she brought in was a plastic bat that didn't even look like a disco pose... I was also underwhelmed by John's Chicago Bulls logo; I actually do find that very funny, but I've seen that on Insta before, and I bet he did too, rather than coming up with it himself. If Nick's story is true, that's cute, but I'm skeptical and so wasn't that impressed by his vase/drum either. And Sophie's pie thing led to a funny bit, thanks to Steve jumping in to back her up, even bringing it back to "BOOBIES", since that had appealed to Greg, but there was no salvaging Sophie's prize, I guess.
The Claw task -- Alex was very nice to remind Steve about the no-opening-the-door rule (Steve explained on the podcast this was his first task), but the rest of Steve's performance is just impressive. You've got to hand it to the man, he's just really good. John also had a good showing (I bet all that cramming helped), but I'm a bit sad for him that even him finding the shortcut didn't net him the highest score, because Steve was just too fast. And after Greg messed with him by saying he had to disqualify John (poor man really did look like he was sweating XD) Joanne and Sophie's attempts were just fun to watch, and I liked Nick's attempt with magnets, even though it didn't actually seem to work that well. Ooh, and Joanne's idea of extracting the cat through a different, easier hole and then lowering and then immediately raising it on a rope through the right hole. I don't have a ton to say about this one specifically, but it was sort of your classic Taskmaster task, and it was nice to see the range of approaches and competencies. I think also, other than the tiebreaker last episode, it was the first actual problem-solving task of the series, and it's always nice to see how the contestants' minds work.
Team task -- OK, I actually agree with Steve that the team of 3's special effects movie was more epic but Steve and Nick's was "more better", because theirs was very elegantly done. Except for the horrible pancake batter, and Steve explained on the podcast that Nick had had to do stuff with sticks, so his hands would not be obscuring the plates, pan handle, etc. Steve also shared on the podcast that he had to bail early for a play he was acting in, so all the greenscreen stuff except for the very end was Nick on his own after Steve already left -- and that does explain why the roles were so unevently distributed. The team of 3's task looked like fun chaos, and I enjoyed John and Joanne trying to explain how the objects floating around Sophie were symbolic of the sun (pepper) and toxic masculinity (armless mannekin torso), but I thought they were a bit overscored.
Sticking and hanging task -- wait, how did Sophie's star stay on? did she just hook the star over the board and that was counted as legit? I mean, I'm not complaining about Sophie getting 5 points for once, I'm happy for her! but is that actually within the rules? So sad that John flew too close to the sun in this case and the board was just too heavy, because his Blu Tack technique was solid, actually. AMAZING how closely Steve's David ended up cutting it, but that was properly exciting (and I guess that toffee might've saved the day). Joanne once again demonstrates that her strategy of not being overly ambitious but just getting the task done is a very solid strategy for Taskmaster. I mean, really, she could've stuck a piece of paper to the board and walked away with the same 3 points. I am, however, a bit concerned that she associates "science" with Elon Musk... Like some of the Reddit commenters, I assumed that Nick's choice of bottle was because you can modulate its weight by pouring out the water, until it was a weight that he could stick for long enough -- but either that's not what he intended at all, or he forgot in the middle of his breakdown. Poor Nick XD At least John's failure was dramatic; his was just very sad. Nick seems to have the amazing quality of making everyone, including Greg, feel sorry for him when things go badly (which is a lot), but not, sadly for him, in a way that would get him some points, as he hopefully inquires. Steve and Ed on the podcast discuss the idea both of them had -- Steve AFTER the task -- of putting the board on the floor and sticking something heavy to it (maybe standing on it) and letting gravity do all the work -- and now I'm sad that nobody actually did that, because that would be brilliant, along the lines of winning the s7 blinking task by just closing youe eyes, which nobody did either.
Live task (guessing movies from first/last letters) -- the gessing from first letters part was less interesting than most studio tasks, I thought, and even Joanne's random wrong guesses like "Batman Bigman" or the episode namer were just not that funny (not a lot of fun phrases in this episode in general, I guess, unlike last week's, so Steve's puns about John's robot getting "humans" and exhorting Patatas to "be bravas" had to do the heavy lifting). And it's one of those things that's definitely easier for team of 3 than team of 2 because they have one more person -- or, if you want, double the number of people -- guessing. (Although Reddit points out that they have to navigate more different accents, which does seem like it's sometimes a challenge for them in this task, so, maybe it balances out?) The last round of guessing from the ends of movies was more interesting, and I wish more of the task had been that.
I wonder how John feels about being tied with Sophie this episode XD
Also, re: this outtake -- you don't have to read the fanfiction, Greg XD Most people don't go searching AO3 for fic about themselves. Also, I'm counting down to when something title "Lovely Home Together" shows up in the Taskmaster RPS tag. That seems to be how this cycle goes...
I was feeling fuzzy headed and needed something low-impact to do with my brain, so I ended up listening to John reading his autobiography, A Robins Among the Pigeons, on his radio talk show, and now he is even more my favorite this series. The bit that won me over completely was spoilers I guess the chapter on his time in Oxford, where he started smoking a pipe because that's what you do, isn't it, and kept going to The Bird and the Baby as a ritual outing, and writing a poem based on the Tolkien mythos entitled "Seven Stars and Seven Stones" for a poetry class when the assignment was to write an ottava rima about mythology, and then being too embarrassed to read it out loud to the class and claiming the emotion behind the piece was still too raw. I've never related to a Taskmaster contestant harder, lol XD
*
It's T-24 hours for Lyorn, so I'm trying to clear the decks before that drops:
11. Martha Wells, System Collapse -- this picks up, chronologically, right after Network Effect, which is my favorite of the Murderbot series, and so I had huge hopes for it... but actually it ended up being challenging to get through. The first third was a slog, frankly, similar to how I felt about Rogue Protocol (my least favorite of the Murderbots, although I need some distance from this one to figure out whether maybe this one is going to take over that mantle...); the middle third picked up a bit relative to that slow start, but I found it weirdly fanficcy, and then it's only the final third, which really picks up the pace, that felt more like a return to form, and I did enjoy that part, but on average this ends up being "meh". Which is too bad, because I still absolutely love ART and ART and Murderbot's relationship, and I want to enjoy the books that come next, but now I'm a bit more apprehensive about whether I will or not. Spoilers from here
So, the first third, I have two problem with it, I think. The first I think has to do with "redacted" -- i.e. Murderbot avoiding talking about the thing that turns out to be a traumatic flashback/PTSD, and also just generally being in a bad frame of mind. Now, first person narrator talking around PTSD / first person narrator explicitly not telling the reader a thing is something I normally love -- I've loved it with Vlad Taltos and with Peter Grant, for example -- but something about how it's done with Murderbot just didn't work for me. I think maybe because Murderbot's normal narration is already more of a downer, and Murderbot in a particularly low frame of mind is just not fun for me anymore. The other problem I had with the first third is, there's just too much going on simultaneously. I saw several people on my flist who started System Collapse and then thought they had to reread Network Effect to follow what was going on, but I don't think that's a) the real problem that makes SystemCollapse hard to follow, but also b) not something a sequel should require. I think the problem is, Murderbot is following multiple parallel threads early on -- there's what's happening with it and the humans accompanying it, there's what's happening aboard ART (not necessarily all in the same location), what it's seeing through Three with a different group of people, feed with Mensah, private feed with ART -- like five separate things, and while Murderbot is built for multiple parallel inputs and misses them when it has too few drones, we the human readers are not. And this sort of multiple perception can be a neat stunt-writing thing -- I recall liking very much getting Justice of Torren's multiple-ancillary POV in one of the Ann Leckie books, e.g. -- but at this length I didn't find it neat, just confusing. I think part of why the second third picked up for me a bit was that Murderbot was in the blackout zone and was thus limited to just the humans it was with and ART-drone, and eventually also AdaCol2 -- a much more manageable number of inputs.
But that middle third is also kind of slow, and I never actually cared about the fate of the colonists because we never really got to meet them properly (and also mostly I don't care about the humans very much in these books). And Murderbot was still down on itself, although I did appreciate the interaction between it and ART-drone, it and AdaCol2 the local system in the primitive language they have to use to communicate, and also Tarik the ex-corporate commando (although I completely do not care about his sex thing with Rathi, like, at all). The climactic moment of this part is Murderbot et al putting together the propaganda vid -- I mean, it's a documentary, but it's still a propaganda vid, just, you know, a GOOD propaganda vid. And this felt really fanficcy to me. Like, it's nice that Murderbot gets to make a media thing, and it feels right that it uses its experience to help humans make an informed decision -- it echoes thematically with giving SecUnits the keys to their governor modules and letting them decide whether to turn them and what to do next -- empowering people to make choices for themselves... but it felt fitting in the way of good fanfiction, rather than what I want from Murderbot proper.
But then actual action started happening, and Murderbot was no longer moping about [redacted], and things really picked up for me in the last thrid. Finally the pacing was actually exciting, and I kept wanting to read ahead instead of having to force myself to read because the book would disappear off my Kindle soon and I'd waited a long time to get it. I enjoyed B-E's Lenore having to join up with Murderbot's bunch after an attempted coup against her. Murderbot asking AdaCol2 for help with increasing desperation was great, and I was happy to learn that it had gone down but survived and could start helping Murderbot again. The final escape, where Murderbot takes control over ART-drone's pathfinders because ART-drone is too damaged and "boops" the hostile shuttle with one of them as a defensive maneuver was great! And I like that Murderbot is contining to offer SecUnits it meets freedom, and now we have one B-E one who decided to keep the fact that it's hacked its governor module a secret and pretend to keep doing its job, like Murderbot had done for a while.
And the ending was great, with the bigger, more powerful ship (Holism) that ART hates, and tells Murderbot not to talk to (but Murderbot offers Three to listen to it, so that Holism might also get an emotional support SecUnit of its own). The passive-aggressive one-upmanshipvia sigfigs was beautiful.
ART continues to be my favorite thing about this series by far. I was delighted to hear that ART is considered to be in command of itself even under normal circumstances and is second-in-command of missions after Seth, and has the same position in the teaching faculty and in the underground railroad thing they've got going as Iris, I guess kind of as an older sib to her I guess. ART doing his TV show villain thing ("We have your group locked down and are negotiating [their] surrender." "I'm not with them. [...] You'll have to begotiate your surrender to me separately." And "I wouldn't recommend it. I lack a sense of proportional response. I don't advise engaging with me on any level" -- and then playing chicken with the B-E shuttle XD) And of course the interaction with Murderbot ('"I've fucked everything up," I'd told ART. [...] ART had said, That's nothing new. I ignored that because it was just trying to reassure me. If it started being sympathetic it would be terrifying. [...] "Something in me broke." My wormhole drive is broken. "That can be fixed," I said. [...] "This is happening in my organic never tissue." Yes, which is why the humans diagnosed it so quickly, ART said. When it happens to them, are they considered disposable? [...] "Stop, stop it. This isn't you talking this is just your..." Yeah, I'd walked into that one, too. My certification in advanced trauma protocol? it said. Of course, that can't possibly be useful in this situation. ') and then, when ART-drone is badly damaged, Murderbot cueing up its favorite episode of WorldHoppers for comfort -- and then ART-prime bossing Murderbot and Iris around ("Don't just sit there, ART said to me and Iris [...] Console each other. I said, You fuck off at the same time as Iris said, Oh, shut it, Peri, and that felt even better.") ART and Tarik arguing was also fun (Tarik said, Oh please, don't start with it. [...] Tarik is confused by philosophical debate, ART-drone said. Because it likes to win and it won't shut up until it does, Tarik said. Tarik has an issue with projecting his emotions onto others, ART-drone said.")
Hopefully the fact that the ending worked for me much better than the beginning is a good sign for Murderbot's subsequent adventres with Murderbot, even though they will presumably include the rest of Perihelion's crew and possibly multiple inputs. And I do look forward to more Murderbot and Tarik interaction.
Random things: I learned from a panel some time ago that the various media things Murderbot watches are sort of patterned on real shows. So, ART's beloved WorldHoppers is SGA, and I think Sanctuary Moon is How To Get Away with Murder? When Murderbot mentions "a show that [...] was semi-historical, about early humans leaving their original system for the first time", I wondered if this was something like The Expanse. And I assume Medcenter Argala is General Hospital (since it's meant to be a particularly long-running show).
Quotes about things other than ART (just one quote, really XD):
"Tarik did a body language thing that started as an aborted clap on my shoulder and ended with an awkward shrug as he remembered I wouldn't like it."
12. Here Be Dragons (RoL GN), Ben Aaronovitch and Andrew Cartmel -- I was disappointed by the last GN and so held off on getting this one, especially as Amazon's prices on the printe editions went up by like 50% with this one, but meathiel said this one was good, so I went ahead and ordered it. And I did like it a lot more than the average GN in this series. spoilers from here Favorite bits were the page where Peter checks off the various legendary critters he's faced, complete with going up against a dragon in Conan the Barbarian loincloth and armed with a sword and projecting forward to facing down a, what is that, a Beholder? in full pointy hat wizard get up, Mick describing his friend Plugs as looking "like Gandalf joined the Hell's Angels" (accurate!), and "Scully" (not his real name, and he's actually the believer, not the skeptic) believing in all the stuff about UFO sightings but being dismissive of Peter's actual brand of weird bollocks, and also the contact photo Peter has chosen for him. I liked the NPA (chopper coppers, heh) team in general, especially the ex-military pilot who's heard all the jokes about her avian last name, and their Top Gun quotes swear jar. I was also amused by Peter getting to meet Patsy the fellow architecture nerd and then getting infected by her questioning inflections at the end of sentences? even in the narration boxes? I enjoyed the Frank Caffery cameo, suggesting to call Peter's plan for corraling the wyverns "Operation Godzilla" or "Operation Khaleesi." I enjoyed the plot of this too. The fey don't always work well for me in this series, but I found their part in this entertaining here. I probably couldn't appreciate the music cameos as much as some people, but I liked the way music was woven through the whole story, inciting incident, trigger for the attacks, as Peter eventually figured out, and also resolution, being the hinge of Peter's plan. And I liked that Plugs got over his belle dame sans merci after all, and the wyverns got to live happily in Wales. Also neat to see how the twins are coming along and Abigail's current hair evolution, and learn that Peter has apparently read Anne McCaffrey. So yeah, I liked this one!